This invention relates in general to the telephone industry, and in particular to a device and method for providing prepaid telephone calling credit.
A long-standing problem in the telephone industry concerns providing long distance telephone services to customers who are away from their home or business telephones. To address this problem, many local telephone companies and, today, many private companies, provide pay telephones at various public locations. Such pay telephone stations require the user to insert coins into the pay station to place a call. In the case of a long distance call from a pay telephone, the caller must secure and have on hand sufficient coins (usually several dollars for just a few minutes) to cover the long distance telephone charges and, every few minutes the call is interrupted by an operator or an automated attendant asking the caller for more coins to continue the call. This procedure is obviously inconvenient, and more importantly, persons typically do not carry sufficient coins to place a long distance call from a pay telephone.
In attempt to solve this problem, long distance carriers have provided charge calling cards to their credit-worthy customers which allow these users to place local and long distance calls from most telephones by entering a calling card access number imprinted on the face of the charge calling card, and then have the long distance charges billed to the charge calling card account. However, many persons do not have an adequate credit rating to obtain such cards.
Another significant problem concerns theft of the calling card access number. It is common for such thieves to use or sell the numbers associated with such cards, and to thereafter accumulate hundreds and even thousands of dollars in unauthorized charges on the account before the theft is detected from the next monthly billing statement. There are currently criminal rings which steal calling card security numbers with sophisticated surveillance equipment and sell such numbers to unscrupulous buyers. Further, customers with charge calling cards are often assessed a monthly fee, irrespective of actual long distance usage, along with the higher per-minute rates and additional charges called "surcharges" every time the card is used, making the use of these cards an expensive alternative.
Some telephone service providers, therefore, sell debit calling cards which require the caller to prepay for long distance credit, and provide a calling card magnetically coded for the prepaid amount. A major drawback to the use of cards of this specific type is the necessity for special high cost, high technology telephones capable of accepting and reading these cards. The high costs limit the availability of telephones that accept the cards. Further, when the prepaid time runs out, it is inconvenient to prepay for additional time.
Other attempts to solve the problem have included the sale of debit cards in retail establishments which consist of an envelope containing a debit card and a separate label listing the personal identification number that allows access to the long distance telephone network. However, this method is inconvenient and requires a significant amount of space behind the counter at the retail outlet.
In an attempt to overcome the problems associated with selling debit cards at retail outlets, other service providers allow customers to prepay by mail for a disposable calling card. Nevertheless, it is inconvenient to order by mail and there are also time delays before the card is received.
Also, because of the above described problems with prior debit calling card systems, insofar as applicant is aware, there have not been any attempts to provide prepaid long distance credit with other products such as greeting cards, business cards, books, and product manuals. Such applications allow a consumer or seller to provide prepaid long distance credit to a desired recipient. For example, in connection with greeting cards, parents could provide prepaid long distance credit to children away at college to encourage their children to call home, as well as to reduce the cost created by a collect call made from the children to their parents' home. With respect to business cards, the salesperson could hand out business cards with prepaid long distance credit to encourage the recipient to hold on to the card with the hope that he will place a return call to the salesperson to acquire goods or services.
For the reasons discussed above, none of the currently available debit calling cards are highly desirable to the purchasers and ultimate users of the card. Nor do any of the currently available debit calling cards provide an effective or desirable method of providing prepaid long distance credit as a gift or in connection with the sale of goods or services.